The mixed responses came despite Miyazaki’s well-known anti-war stance in Japan, where he made headlines in 2015 as he urged his country’s leaders “to say clearly that aggressive war was completely wrong, having brought enormous damage to the Chinese people”. Miyazaki, a co-founder of Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli and director of films such as … Read more
China is banking on tourism and consumption to power its post-pandemic economic recovery, as a deepening property sector crisis and weak private sector and foreign investor confidence continue to weigh on overall growth. Ching Ming or “tomb sweeping” festival is a day for honouring the dead, by sweeping their resting places and burning paper offerings. … Read more
For the first time in Hayao Miyazaki’s decades-spanning career, the 82-year-old Japanese anime master is No. 1 at the North American box office. Miyazaki’s latest enchantment, The Boy and the Heron, debuted with $12.8 million US, according to studio estimates. The Boy and the Heron, the long-awaited animated fantasy from the director of Spirited Away, My Neighbor … Read more
There’s something Aristotle said in his Poetics about the effective use of metaphor. Boiling it down, he observed that while coming up with metaphors takes genius, overstuffing your story with beautiful — but confusing — symbols doesn’t leave you with a timeless piece of art. Instead, you end up with “nothing but riddles or gibberish.” Apparently, … Read more
